It already seems a long time ago. At one point during Danny Boyle's madcap, moving Olympics opening ceremony in July the band struck up a few bars of I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles as giant soapy spheres wafted across the delirious crowd.

As a process last week labelled by one of those intimately involved as the "Stratford farce" reaches yet another crunch point, it could be almost four years before Bubbles is heard at the Olympic Stadium again – if at all. Three days after West Ham United submitted their "best and final" offer to become the stadium's main tenants, the Guardian understands that the 17-strong London Legacy Development Corporation board remains split over the two remaining options on the table.

One would see the LLDC spend around £190m converting the £429m stadium – currently a shell with no permanent facilities – into a venue suitable for both athletics and winter sports, with a new cantilevered roof, hospitality boxes and retractable seats that would slide over an athletics track that was preserved after a bitterly fought campaign. Project managers have estimated it would take until 2015 at the earliest, and quite possibly 2016, to open it again.

The other, favoured by some board members, would see just £38m spent on swiftly turning the stadium into a permanent, "multi-use" home for athletics, concerts and other sports and – after six years of prevarication, legal challenges, ill feeling and political wrangling – finally consign the idea of a top-flight football team moving to E20 to history.

Rather than boarding the stadium up for another four years and letting the golden memories fade, they argue it is best to appoint an experienced stadium operator such as AEG or LiveNation and let them get on with it – even if it requires a modest ongoing public subsidy. Under that plan, the stadium that proved itself so spectacularly during the summer could be open by spring 2014.

London's mayor, Boris Johnson, is clear where he stands: "Londoners have to be a little bit patient and recognise this thing was not built to be the kind of omni-permanent, world-class stadium capable of hosting Premiership football that it should be. There is a clear choice for us all. Do we want to rush ahead for a reopening? Or do we want to deliver the adaptations that will deliver a world-class facility?"

For many "omni-permanent" is not the phrase that springs to mind when the stadium issue is raised but omni-shambles. The inability of successive governments, City Hall administrations and officials to square the stadium circle has always made it among the most troubling of London 2012's legacy promises.

Back in 2007 the option of continuing negotiations with Premier League football clubs in a bid to secure a tenant for after the Games was closed off. With the twin spectres of the Picketts Lock fiasco and the cost and construction overruns at Wembley fresh in the mind, and desperate to ensure that the budget did not spiral further, Tessa Jowell, the then culture secretary, and others on the Olympic board were keen to get on with construction. Lord Coe, meanwhile, was understandably fixated on ensuring the athletics legacy he promised in Singapore was delivered and so could live with building an 80,000 seat semi-permanent stadium that left all options open.

"Today with hindsight would you have done a Manchester City solution? Maybe, but that would have cost quite a lot more. At that time our focus was on keeping within budget and keeping the costs down," former ODA chairman John Armitt has admitted. Jowell argues West Ham's interest was never serious and did not add up for the taxpayer. But Richard Caborn, the former sports minister who was the only dissenting voice against closing down the option of a dual-use stadium when the decision was made at a meeting of the Olympic board in February 2007, remains convinced they were in too much of a hurry to do so.

"The Olympics were a fantastic success, but this is the one area where we got it fundamentally wrong. I put the argument for a multi-sport stadium that would be like the Stade de France, but 10 to 15 years on and I was shouted down. We should have learned lessons from every previous Olympics, including Sydney, and of our own success with the Commonwealth Games stadium in Manchester," he said. "It could have been an example of how you maintain the legacy in a cost effective stadium, using hi-tech materials and our engineering expertise." When the coalition government came into power, the sports minister Hugh Robertson and Johnson were convinced that only top-flight football could maintain the future of the stadium without public subsidy. Baroness Ford, chair of the LLDC's predecessor, the Olympic Park Legacy Company, was also committed to trying to find a solution that did not involve going back to the 25,000-capacity "base case" – a vaguely depressing, windswept athletics track with no roof.

The next attempt to find a workable solution involved a tender for a long-term lease that dissolved into a bitter, fractious battle between Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham. The former proposed ripping out the track and replacing it with a football-only facility while the east London club pledged to keep it and teamed up with UK Athletics and Newham Council.

West Ham were duly awarded the stadium, with the decision to keep the track justified to some extent by London's victory in the race to host the 2017 world athletics championships. But a crucial mistake in failing to anticipate the possibility of a challenge under European state aid rules - which some involved now insist they flagged up earlier in the process to no avail - left the scheme mired in "legal paralysis". A new plan, to retain public ownership of the stadium but offer rental agreements to anchor tenants, was drawn up and has also been subject to interminable delay. As it was decided to plump for the full bells-and-whistles conversion if top-flight football were to be hosted at the stadium, the question became how to plug the funding gap.

West Ham were reluctant to offer more than £10m upfront, plus an RPI linked £2.5m a year in rent, arguing that as tenants they could not be expected to fund the conversion alone. They argued they were also in effect contributing an extra £6m a year through the uplift the LLDC would receive to any naming rights and catering contracts.

The club argued they would have to give up many of their revenue streams and clear their debt before moving because they would no longer have anything on which to secure it. West Ham believe they are being unfairly characterised as being handed a public asset for nothing when they are riding to its rescue.

They argue that they will place the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on the world stage and bring greater footfall and focus. And given that they will now be only one of a number of tenants and occupy the stadium for perhaps just 25 days a year, they will still have a job to do in selling the move to their supporters even if they get the go ahead. LLDC and City Hall insiders raised eyebrows at those figures. As well as selling the idea of largely funding a £190m conversion from the public purse, it would also have to pay at least £2.5m a year in operational costs to cope with the crowds for Premier League football. There was also some frustration at West Ham's negotiating tactics and a culture clash between public sector procurement processes and the economics of Premier League football, plus the inscrutability of the club's owners as to their future plans.

Some on the LLDC board were left wondering whether it was all worth it. The lack of clarity and competing agendas that have clouded the process to date have left Johnson, now chair of the LLDC board, and Dennis Hone, the ODA chief executive who has taken on the same role at the LLDC, with an unenviable task.

The majority, led by Johnson, continue to believe that a future involving West Ham, athletics, concerts and other one-off events including cricket and rugby is the best solution. They will have to convince the remaining waverers that West Ham's final offer, believed to be a "significant" improvement on the £10m originally tendered, is sufficient testament of the seriousness of the east London club's intentions.

Yet another factor is the involvement of Newham Council and its mayor Sir Robin Wales, a West Ham season ticket holder who sees the stadium as a driver of regeneration. As part of West Ham's original collapsed bid it promised a £40m loan towards the then £95m conversion costs. That offer remains on the table but it is understood that the loan could be extended to around £70m to help plug the funding gap. In return the council would expect an increased return and further community access. The reason the conversion costs have soared is because LLDC is determined to make the stadium's future as flexible as possible, along the lines of the 365-day-a-year model favoured by US operators. In-depth talks were held with US sports owners and stadium operators around the recent NFL tie at Wembley.

That requires a complex solution removing the existing 25,000-seat section (originally designed as the only permanent feature) to install retractable seats and constructing a new cantilevered roof over the top of the upper tier (originally designed to be removed after the Games) before installing permanent facilities and corporate hospitality.

The other bids – from Leyton Orient, a football business school and an ambitious but unlikely plan to bring formula one to the Olympic Park – will not detain them for long. The school can happen regardless, Orient depends on the decision taken on West Ham in any case and the F1 scheme is likely to stall on the starting grid.

"The cost of doing the stadium up in the way the country would expect after the Olympics, the cost of producing a world class stadium is considerable. It was not designed for football. A decision was taken a long time ago not to do it that way," argues Johnson, distancing himself from the sins of his predecessors.

But it is precisely the fact that the broad consensus and bold thinking that characterised the rest of the Olympic project has failed to apply to perhaps its most iconic landmark that has landed him in this predicament in the first place. Whichever way they jump, and the West Ham option must remain favourite given Johnson's enthusiasm, they will face a tough job to sell their decision to a public bemused by the Byzantine history and cost of the project.

Meanwhile the mothballed stadium is already starting to look a little unloved on its Stratford island. The "pixels" that lit up the ceremonies have gone, the big screens have come down, the controversial wrap has been removed, the cauldron dismantled and its "petals" returned to Olympic teams around the world.

If they can hit their latest deadline of reaching a decision before the end of the year after discussing their next move at a board meeting on 5 December, Hone and Johnson will then have an equally hard job on their hands: ensuring the ongoing farrago does not burst the popular image of the Olympics as a bubble of golden success.